jeudi 27 février 2014

The Visitor

The Director of the N. zoological museum didn't especially like his job, but
it gave him plenty of free time and a study where he could sit in peace, to
work on his doctoral thesis. There were serious problems with the museum. Lack
of money and lack of interest on the part of the University bosses made it nearly
impossible to reverse the slow degradation of exhibits and furniture. There
were yellowish spots on the ceiling that had been there when he visited the
museum for the first time as a young student. On the floor above a water pipe
had leaked or a tap was not working properly. It had been repaired, but nobody
had whitewashed the damaged ceiling. There were many other things in need of
repair, refurbishment or simply cleaning up. He had himself put new locks on
some glass cabinets containing rare specimens of tropical butterflies and exotic
worms in alcohol. These locks had been broken by Soviet soldiers during the
war: they had looked for spirits and drank every drop, even from the jar where
a large tapeworm found in the intestines of an elk was preserved. The tapeworm
had survived - if we can use the word in speaking of a parasite dead for a hundred
years - this act of vandalism; whether the soldiers survived, nobody knew.

Worst of course were the exhibits themselves, and although his experiences had
made of him a nearly accomplished fatalist, he was still disturbed and even
angry when he found new traces of moths in the fur of the grizzly bear or even
worse: in the piece of mammoth skin found in Siberia in the 1880's and brought
to his town by a renowned explorer, geographer and zoologist whose name had
been given to some newly discovered species of rodents in China and South Asia.
The Director had even bought some insecticide with his own money, frustrated
by the lack of interest from his superiors in the fate of the bear, the mammoth
skin or the stuffed tropical birds which had preserved the colours of their
feathers despite the moths and the dust. Yes, the dust was even worse than the
moths, it gathered in the hair of little marsupials and in the feathers of hummingbirds,
and was nearly impossible to wipe away without damaging these rare specimens,
collected and brought here about one hundred and fifty years ago by an eccentric
noblemen who spent most of his time traveling in Australia, New Zealand and
South America. When he died, little was left of his former wealth, his heirs
had to sell his manor houses and his collections that were bought by the university.
Possibly the dust was nowadays more aggressive, containing something acid or
oily. It seemed to eat into hair and feathers, making them look dull and greyish.

But despite all of that he liked the museum: after the collapse of what had
been the USSR, when people became free to visit Western countries, he had rarely
seen anything similar to it. Some of the old museums in Europe had been destroyed
during the war, some had been modernized, made more attractive and entertaining
for the general public. He thought it was perhaps his egoism that made him oppose
such modernization: in the old-fashioned nineteenth-century museum it was easier
for him to do his work undisturbed by unwelcome visitors and the constant need
to invent new ways to attract more of them. He disliked advertizing, all the
noisiness, humbug and banality that had invaded the country after the coming
of freedom. Maybe he was a traditionalist by character, maybe the years spent
in the museum had made him a traditionalist; anyhow he found his study and the
museum a kind of a lonely island amidst the muddy currents of innovation and
entrepreneurship that were rapidly changing everything around him.

Here he had the feeling that time had stopped or was moving at a quiet pace
as it probably had when the museum was founded and everything still seemed stable
and solid. One of his friends, a mathematician, once said he liked pre-first-world-war
furniture: it was not designed for people who moved, but for people who lived
all their lies in the same flat, in the same house. Like these heavy oak desks,
massive glass cabinets and built-in bookcases full of books on zoology and geography.
There were some rare volumes he kept in a well-locked cabinet: books with autographs
by von Baer, Cuvier, Darwin, Haeckel and Alexander von Humboldt. They all had
been in contact, corresponded with professors here: some of whom were quite
famous during their lifetime. It was something to show to foreign visitors,
some of whom confessed they had a liking for the genuine nineteenth-century
atmosphere in the museum, and - as some of them were frank enough to admit -
in the university in general. Something his bosses wouldn't have been happy
to hear: they were engaged in a P.R. campaign trying to prove that after the
gloomy years of Communist dictatorship the university was once again a wholly
modern scientific institution doing important research in IT, semiconductors
and computing.

As for himself, he was happy enough to be able to study the dynamics of some
bird populations that were quite healthy and numerous in his country, in sharp
contrast to their decay in more advanced and rich European countries. Not all
his visitors shared nostalgic feelings for the nineteenth-century atmosphere
in the university, but all of them admired the abundace of wildlife they could
observe on shorter or longer field trips he organized for them. They were happy
to offer him help and possibility of cooperation in studying wildlife that didn't
any longer exist in the West. Thus he could take the best of both worlds, making
use of laboratory facilities in the West and getting necessary software from
his European colleagues while living and making field studies in his own country,
which was still less populated, polluted and developed than the rich ones. Sometimes
he found he felt a kind of perverse gratitude to the Soviet system which had
transformed huge areas of formerly agricultural landscape in his country into
nature parks jealously guarded from both local people and foreigners by the
all-powerful military.

After all, the Soviet system had also preserved this nineteenth-century atmosphere
in the museum and university. His friend the mathematician thought the musem
was less a museum of zoology than a museum of good and bad old times. The mathematician
wished he were a dictator: he would preserve the university, the town and maybe
the whole country as a museum exhibit, a historical reservation: wasn't every
epoch in itself worth being preserved for future generations? Yes, the Director
nearly agreed with him: the museum was really something more than a museum of
zoology. But he himself? Wasn't he too a museum exhibit, something belonging
to his time, something visitors could look at and study as a rare specimen of
Homo soveticus soveticus?

Yes, in principle the museum was there for visitors, but there were not many
of them, clearly even fewer than in Soviet times when there was much less entertainment
for young and old, fewer TV serials about wildlife and fewer trips to France,
Italy and Greece. But still, every spring, busloads of kids from provincial
schools arrived in his town: their parents had no money to pay for excursions
to Scandinavia or Western Europe, and their teachers considered it their duty
to take them to all museums in the town, although the boys and girls, especially
the teenagers, demonstrated very clearly their total lack of interest for everything
smelling of history and dust. At best they exchanged obscene comments on their
teachers and the stuffed animals (he had to concede they sometimes bore some
similarity to each other, clearly belonging to a very different world than the
students), before rushing out to buy more coke and chips from the nearest kiosk.

The little kids were different: they even seemed to have a feeling of awe standing
before the skeleton of a mammoth and the two stuffed bisons. They stopped to
look at the bears and the lynx. Once a little girl asked him "Sir, is this
big cat alive?" Usually he didn't guide the excursions himself: he had
an aide, often a student eager to earn a little extra money. But there were
some groups of students he liked and wanted to meet personally, if possible:
these were the naturalists, children with a real, sometimes passionate, interest
for animals and nature. Some of them were already well-read in biology, some
had done some serious research, observed birds, small rodents or insects. Once
a year there was a gathering of them at the university. He really admired these
youngsters who pursued their interest with such gentle determination, paying
little attention to the lures of the emerging consumer society and to their
own poverty: a few of them came from small townships and were really poor, their
parents having lost their jobs, and living on unemployment benefits. But he
felt sure these guys would go on and enter the university: they were predestined
to become biologists despite all the ups and downs of economics and politics.
They were born to carry rubber boots and backpacks, to sleep in tents and wade
through muddy streams. Like him: he had been such a passionate naturalist himself,
and had a special relationship with them. Sometimes he even could help them,
giving them a little money as prizes for papers they presented to the university
biologists who acted as a jury. And during the gathering they were taken to
the university canteen and had free dinners there.

Every weekend, families came to the museum. Most often dads with their little
children, rarely moms. Either the furry stuffed animals had some special attraction
for the little boys still lurking in the grown-up men, or taking the kids to
the museum was just the easiest way for them to do something with the children.
Perhaps they really wanted to be with them, perhaps they had been just sent
out by mom who was cleaning up the flat.

Rarely were there other visitors in the museum. Of course, retired people sometimes
came, sometimes a group of elderly Finns or Swedes was brought here, sometimes
some Mormons or Christian fundamentalists came to try to convert him and gave
him books on Creationist biology. He observed these people like rare specimens
of birds - for some reason they reminded him first of all of birds - and noticed
that mostly they were just satisfied with the work they had done and not worried
by its results. They had fulfilled their duty, they had tried to save him, they
had gathered some merit points for themselves, and the rest was his and God's.

There were a couple of lunatics who visited him from time to time too. Fortunately
they were not very troublesome. One wrote long treatises explaining that his
people came from a sunken continent and had a special mission here on Earth;
according to him it was proven by their peculiar anthropometric characteristics.
He believed that it was absolutely necessary to forbid all mixed marriages and
restore the pure race of the chosen people who had once left their homeland.
Now the time was ripe, if there were enough people of this ancient race on Earth,
the sunken continent would rise again and the golden age would return... The
other believed he could understand the language of birds and told the Director
stories he believed he had heard from crows, jackdaws and pigeons; curiously
enough, mostly frivolous stories of common small town gossip.

When the girl student manning the reception desk this late afternoon came over
with the visitor he saw at once that the man was a loony too. He was dressed
in a sheepskin coat and had on massive boots and an old fur hat such as the
peasants used to wear a generation ago. On his back he carried a cloth bag.

The girl announced a bit uneasily that the man wanted to speak with the Director;
she probably felt that it should have been her duty not to let this strange
man in.

- OK, - the Director said, - thank you. You can go home, I'll stay here for
an hour or two. And turning to the man, he asked:

- What can I do for you? noticing at the same time that the stranger had beautiful,
childishly blue eyes. He couldn't tell his age, perhaps he was was about sixty.

- The man smiled, and his face seemed for a moment even more childish.

- My greetings to you and thank you for receiving me in this honorable institution.
I would appreciate it if you could answer some of my questions about certain
animals that once lived on Earth.

He couldn't but feel real curiosity. A man who spoke solemnly using such old-fashioned
expressions, could be an interesting specimen of Homo. And there was something
pleasant in him, he was probably not aggressive, hopefully not too talkative
either.

- Thanks for the compliments, I am ready to answer your questions, if I only
can.

- Thank you. I was told by some lads and lasses in the vicinity that there are
some stuffed ancient animals in your institution. Are there some among them
that are now extinct, exterminated by man?

- Sure, - he answered. - One or two species of hummingbirds, one species of
toad, and some marsupials which have not been spotted for many years. And the
famous migratory pigeon from America you may know about.

- Yes, of course, - nodded the visitor. - I remember it quite well. One moment
please, I must search for them in my book.

He picked up the bag, untied its laces and took out an old thick book.

- Can you please tell me the names of these creatures, preferably in Latin?

The Director said he certainly could, but that he must check them up in his
books. Couldn't the visitor sit down, he may have come a long way.

- Yes, quite a long way according to your criteria, - was the answer. The visitor
sat on a chair and began browse through his big book. Catching a glimpse of
it, the Director noticed that it was handwritten, possibly not in Latin characters,
but he couldn't be sure of that. Maybe the old man had invented a script of
his own: he had heard of mentally ill people who did precisely this.

He found the Latin names of the extinct species, told them to the visitor and
asked him if he would like to see them in the glass cabinets. The man said yes,
and they went into the museum proper. As they stopped in front of the cabinet
of hummingbirds, he showed the visitor a bird that was extinct according to
the latest information he had. The visitor nodded. Suddenly a veil of melancholy
had fallen on the merry childishness of his clear-blue eyes.

As they walked on towards the showcase holding the migratory pigeon the visitor
said, as if to himself:

- Yes,man,man, I should have listened to my angels, they warned me, they warned
me, but it was too late, I had already done it...

The he turned to the Director and asked:

- What do you think, was it a mistake that I created you, Homo sapiens?

So that was it! The visitor considered himself to be God himself. It was certainly
not a common thing even among the psychiatric patients. In asylums you could
easily find prophets, kings, dictators, Napoleons and Gengis Khans, but he had
never heard of anybody pretending to be God himself. The poor man was probably
worrying about ecological problems and thought himself, as the creator of mankind,
responsible for all the mess the genus Homo had made on Earth. He couldn't but
feel some sympathy for him: it would certainly not be easy to be God, real or
imaginary.

- You know, we biologists often think man is a kind of a failure,a mighty neural
computer serving the interests of a little capricious child. But as men ourselves,
we can't be too self-critical, we can't deny our own right to exist, despite
the fact that we are now denying this right to so many other living beings.

They stopped in front of the pigeon, an old, already damaged bird fastened to
a branch and looking at the visitors with its dark-brown glass eyes. The visitor
nodded once more and said:

- Yes, it's really a problem both for me and for you. But what is your opinion:
would it be reasonable to resuscitate these extinct animals, at least some of
them? Could they survive in the world, if man is still there, or is it hopeless?

The Director said he didn't have any definite opinion on this subject. It had
never been even an academic problem for biologists, although it could become
one, thanks to the advances in genetic engineering. Some researchers had already
discussed the possibility of re-creating the mammoth. But yes, for some species
the situation was really hopeless, there was no place left for them, as Homo
was colonizing the last remaining patches of wilderness.

- I am really worrying about this issue: I feel I should do something. But for
me too it would be woeful to destroy a species it took me such an effort to
create and on whom I have placed so many hopes. And there are still some really
righteous people on Earth, how could I send them back to Nothing? Maybe there
is still a compromise possible. What do you think?

The old lunatic seemed so genuine in his worries that the Director couldn't
but feel some sympathy for him. Unfortunately he could do very little to help
him, but maybe a reassuring, optimistic answer would somehow calm him down.
He tried to summarize his ideas in a more positive tone:

- I think it could be possible. The demographic explosion (he wondered whether
the visitor knew this expression) shows signs of slowing down; if the number
of people on Earth remained stable or began to diminish, there would still be
hope for both nature and mankind...

He caught himself formulating a serious plea for the genus Homo to a madman
who believed he was God himself. It was ridiculous, he had to cut it short and
send the man away. He had more serious things to do.

- After all, you know, our species is a relatively young one, maybe we are still
able to learn something. But I must excuse myself, I have some work to do, and
the museum is officially closed already. Do you wish to see something more?

- No, thank you very much, it was really generous of you ... yes, you are right,
you are a young species, yes, you should perchance have some more time to learn.
But still, it will be very hard for you to respond, when I will come and ask
what you have done with all the beings I demanded you rule and take care of
... Oh, still one little question, if you permit...

- You are welcome.

- It's about this pigeon. Do you think it would have a chance to survive, to
have a - what was the word, o yes, habitat - if it were to reappear on Earth?

- The pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius. Yes, I think there could be enough habitat
for the pigeon, it could manage quite well.

- Thank you very much indeed. Now it's time for me to depart. It was really
pleasurable to meet you. I am sure we will meet in the future world. Farewell.

The old man put the book back into his bag and bowed; he escorted him to the
door, and watched as he went down the large stairs leading to the hall and from
there to the front door. There, the visitor turned around and waved the Director
goodbye. The Director went back to the museum. The student had left, he had
to turn the lights off himself. Going to the switches he heard a strange noise
from the far end of the room. He went over. The noise came from the showcase
of the migratory pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius. The bird was fluttering around,
hitting the glass panes in its attempt to get out.

lundi 17 février 2014

The architect Le Corbusier wrote that a
house is a machine of living. He also wanted to do away with
spontaneously arisen cities and highways replacing them with man-made
modern, functional and «geometrical» ones. More less at the same
time the Estonian linguist Johannes Aavik wrote that language is a
machine of communication, and must be re-engineered and remodelled
according to the needs of modern communication. The language of the
past that evolved at slow pace in village communities was not fit for
our times. Now we know better than our ancestors how a language
should look like.

Both these men were children of their
times. The beginning of the twentieth century gave birth to Italian
and Russian futurism with similar ideas, similar cult of technology,
of machines and similar rejection of the past they considered to have
been irrational and dark. But they were also children of their
culture, of the Western civilization. Formal rules that can be
written down and scrupulously observed are an integral part of this
civilization. The tendency of formalisation is present in this
culture from its beginnings. We can see its emergence already in
Pythagorean vision of the cosmos (and music) as a mathematical
construct, in the formalisation of logic by Aristotle, in the
development of astrology, and later, of the formalistic catholic
theology, but also of musical theory, of harmony and point counter
point. We can also mention the ideas of Raimundus Lullus as well as
Leibniz about the possibility to find a machine or a calculus
permitting us to find out all truthful expressions, i.e. to find the
hidden mathematical foundations, the real mathematical essence of
everything. The West took over and integrated some Near Eastern
legalistic and ideas that led to the rise of Roman law and the ideas
of the rule of law. In the West, law is often considered to be an
absolute, rule of law is an ideal of the West. Nowadays this rule of
law and rule of rules and regulations has reached an apotheosis in
the EU. The EU is designed to become a machine, a well-programmed
computer, running flawlessly. This is the ideal, and in the name of
this ideal both common sense and humanism are sometimes put aside.

The problem with such machinery is that
they never work flawlessly, nature is most probably not a calculus,
and all formulae, equations and theories describing it are
necessarily limited and uncomplete. This is most probably a corollary
of the famous Gödel theorem of incompleteness. In practice, the
impossibility of regulating all human activity with laws and rules,
the impossibility of a complete rule of law leads to increasing
problems and crises as we see now in Europe. These crises cannot
probably be overcome by more rules and regulations, more formal
steps. They need a critical reevaluation of the hidden philosophical
foundations of our policies, of our ideals.

I think that what we need is a
reappraisal of our belief in formalism, a step away from legalism
that has shaped our societies and our thinking for centuries, if not
thousands of years. We can perhaps find some inspiration from one
cradle of our civilization, from the Near East, namely from Judaism.
Judaism is very legalistic, the rabbis have worked out a tremendous
system of rules with their interpretations. But despite the
importance of rules, there is a metarule rending nul and void nearly
all the rules, stopping the halakhic machinery. It is the rule that
saving a life, a living soul is more important than observing any
rule. There are some exceptions, namely one is not permitted to save
one's life by denying God's existence or worshipping false gods. But
the fact is that there is something more important than laws and
rules, and this something is human life.

There is perhaps also something to
learn from the Chinese social system where the rule of law was not so
important than in the West. Traditionally, here the law was mostly
criminal law and the courts dealt with thieves, robbers and
murderers, not for example with financial disputes between
businessmen or other people. These were handled by families or
professional organizations, guilds. Thus there were fewer laws and
codices in traditional China than in Europe. Still, the Chinese
society was relatively much more stable than the western ones, what
is proven by the continuity of its culture and tradition. Confucius
was a contemporary of Plato. We don't know much about Plato's family
or descendants nor abpout the genealogy of other major figures of the
antique. In China, the direct descendants of Confucius are still
there, as well as the manor, the tomb and even the chariot of the
philosopher.

switches of a machine must be made of
solid metal. When we want to see things social, moral or spiritual
functioning as machines, they too must have solid components. The
components of our European machinery are made of words and concepts.
What in practice is nearly the same as things called essences.
Essence is what makes a rose a rose, a human being a human being,
happiness happiness, etc. A deeply ingrained European belief is that
everything has an essence, and the way to find out essences of things
is to try to define them. Thus, the European machine is being
constructed, and this construction is a permanent process, of
well-defined words, concepts. This is true of science, of philosophy,
but also of jurisprudence and morals. Laws are written with words,
and to apply them we must find out the differences e.g. between
manslaughter and murder, theft and robbery. This is also happening in
politics: we are talking about democracy, human rights, freedom and
corruption as something clearly definable. And being accustomed to
such concepts we take for granted that such things, such essences as
democracy, freedom, egality, rights, etc. exist as clear-cut,
definable entities. They resemble measuring sticks, rules with clear
centimetre or inche lines drawn on them. And we use these rules to
measure and evaluate things, lifeless and living, ourselves and other
people. We tend to believe that we are able to measure their rights
and wrongs, to find out whether they are fit to function as
components of our economical, moral or spiritual machine. The basic
European religion, its first and foremost belief is the belief in
words, concepts and essences. This is a belief shared by nearly all
Western systems of thought, liberals and conservatives, religious
fundamentalists and communists, revolutionaries and
counter-revolutionaries. Thus it is perhaps important to keep in mind
that this belief is not shared at least by one Chinese school way of
looking at things, namely Taoism. The Taoists believe that most
important thoughts cannot be put into words. Who knows, doesn't
speak, who speaks, doesn't know as has said Laozi. And they have
found many common points with Buddhists who deny the existence of any
essences.

The Western tendency of formalization
has already created a situation where legislative acts must be
processed with special computer programmes, creating an ordered
database of normative acts, otherwise even a person reasonably
competent in law is lost. This computerized processing, comparing,
editing juridical texts can be compared to processing of medical
information. Computerization has here led to computerized
diagnostics. Sometimes a computer can here achieve better results
than a qualified doctor. Could in future juridical procedures be
computerized too, e.g. will computers take over litigations and pass
judgments and sentences? This possibility is, of course, a reductio
ad absurdum of the logic of development in the Western societies, and
probably will never become a reality. But the fact is that the
formalization of nearly everything, be it evaluation of science,
arts, personalities, etc, has reached an astonishing and troubling
level. I think that we need a return to humanism, to human
understanding, to human language that is very often non-formalistic,
«non-Aristotelian». And we need an authority who can change
legislation, override legal acts and court judgments. How such an
authority could be established and what should guarantee that this
authority cannot abuse its supreme powers? I don't know. Perhaps we
can learn something from the history, be it the history of various
monarchies, be it in Europe, Asia, Africa or America. I think that
here too, the Chinese example could be worth studying.